Arctic Yearbook 2014 - Page 116

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Arctic Yearbook 2014
those with only compulsory schooling, and those with post-secondary for two years or longer or
postgraduate education earned more than 16% more than those with only compulsory education.
Their labour supply increased by 4% and 12%, respectively. The YSM is assumed to capture the
assimilation process. There was about a 3% yearly increase in female earnings and a 2.6% increase in
labour participation per each year since migration.
Immigrant women married to a Swedish-born partner were more successful in the labour market
compared to women with an immigrant partner, and single women were less successful than married
women. Immigrant women in mixed couples earned 19% more than single women and 13% more
than women married to an immigrant partner, and their employment rates were greater by 27% and
6%, respectively. This supports the hypothesis of an influence of specific human capital on labour
market outcomes because women with a native partner have better opportunities to obtain such
capital due to learning host-country customs within the family. However, the effect of civil status
was the opposite for labour immigrants. Single female labour immigrants earned 57% more than
women who were not employed during their first year of immigrating to Sweden, female labour
immigrants married to an immigrant partner earned 52% more, and those married to a Swedish-born
partner earned 28% more. In particular, single female labour immigrants were employed on 41
percentage points more often than those married to a Swedish-born partner.
On average, the presence of children 0–3 years old in the household was linked to lower levels of
earnings by about 9%–10% and lower labour supply by about 12%–13%. Estimates revealed greater
than average earnings of women originating from the Nordic countries and having children of preschool age. Earnings of other groups of women did not exhibit any association with the presence of
pre-school age children. However, married Swedish-born women experienced a 3.4% decrease in
earnings when having small children. Immigrant women from the Nordic countries increased their
LFP by 12% when having preschool children.
As discussed earlier, earnings and employment rates among immigrant women were less on average
than for Swedish-born women. Immigrant women’s actual LFP rates and their participation after
controlling for the set of variables as well as their earnings deficits relative to native-born women are
depicted in Figures 7 and 8. Immigrants originating from Denmark and Poland and having a
relatively long period of assimilation had better labour outcomes compared to other groups. The
differences in the raw data were rather large and exhibited 22 percentage points gap in earnings
between Swedish-born women and women from Finland. Respective gaps in earnings between
Swedish-born women and women Southern Europe are 31.2 pp, Central and Southern Africa (29.6
pp), South America (27.3 pp), and North America, Japan, and Oceania (35 pp). However, the gaps
diminished with increasing periods of integration, especially for women from Denmark, Poland, and
the former Soviet Union (Figure 7). This supports the hypothesis of the importance of countryspecific human capital and human capital in general and reveals that integration, measured in
economic outcomes, can be quite successful even in first-generation immigrants.
Employment rates were lower in all groups of immigrant women compared to Swedish-born
women. These differences in employment rates ranged from 8% for immigrants from Poland to
42% for immigrant women from Iran/Iraq. The reduction was even greater for married women
Kotyrlo